Author's Notes: First off, for everyone who has lost someone to the virus, I want to let you know how sorry I am. For those who have survived, but aren't ever the same, you are also in my thoughts and prayers.

Arnel, thank you for beta'ing!

I am currently on a road trip and wrote this while I was in Canada, but now I'm in Vermont of a day and have enough wifi to post.

Love to all of you! Please consider finding me on patreo n OR buying a book from amazon- Sarah Jaune
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter

Chapter 77 – Dedicate chapter to those who lost their lives

James landed his broom at the coach's whistle and grinned at the Keeper, Miles Shawes, who landed next to him. "That was good," James told him. Miles had made a seriously excellent save against one of the reserve Chasers, who had definitely improved his game over the summer. They had one Chaser who was looking to retire in another year or two and James was confident the new bloke would be ready to step in when the time came.

A brisk breeze swept through the stadium, cooling James' sweat-soaked hair. It was nearly Christmas and they were well into their season, but the weather hadn't yet turned cold and it made practice go smoothly.

"Good game," the coach called out, his voice magically magnified. "Head for the lockers to clean up and then we'll have a team meeting before everyone leaves."

James headed off with Miles and the other blokes to get a shower before returning to the team locker room where they held all of their meetings. It wasn't uncommon to have a meeting after an intense practice, whether that was a good practice or not, but something tickled at James' stomach as he walked in to find the coach waiting along with most of the rest of the team, already silent.

"Are you aware of what is going on in the wider Muggle world?" Coach asked them as soon as the whole team was settled.

The team collectively shook their heads, all looking equally bewildered as his coach let out a long sigh. "News came in as we were in the middle of practice that a virus is spreading in the Muggle world."

James, who only had a vague idea of what a virus was, glanced over at his other teammates and saw some clearly understood what that meant, while others, like himself, remained in the dark.

"What it means for us," Coach said shortly, "is that we will not be able to hold matches where Muggles will be exposed to us, in any way. They are beginning a quarantine measure as we speak and mandating people to stay in their homes."

One of the Beaters said exactly what James was thinking. "Are you serious?"

"Yes," the coached told them soberly. "The Muggles do not have the ability to cure this disease and it's killing a lot of people."

"Is there nothing we can do to help?" the Seeker asked in a quiet voice.

Coach faced her and shook his head. "That's not up to me to say. It'll be up to the Ministry, but right now there is nothing we can do. We have games scheduled that would be noticed by the Muggles, at least the groups arriving for the games would. Until that is sorted, we're going to be rescheduling or shuffling locations about to places where Muggles are unlikely to see us. If they haven't sorted this by the time the World Cup is on, we'll move that to the stadium in Montana that doesn't have anything around it for hundreds of miles in all directions. I've heard that from the overseers already when they sent out notices."

"So does this mean anything for us?" James asked, wondering what they were going to do about practices.

"No," Coach assured him. "Just try to come and go without being spotted, if you can."

It was with this brief ringing through his ears, James left the meeting, only to find Heather waiting for him, her blue eyes huge with alarm. "Can you believe it?" she asked him in a quiet voice. "It's so scary!"

James wasn't particularly scared or alarmed. Typically, Muggle diseases did nothing to the Magical community and vice versa, but what did alarm him was Heather, yet again, seeking him out. He understood that some people wanted to get close to him because of his father, but thankfully he hadn't run into that on the team.

Except, possibly, in Heather's case.

Sure enough… "Has your father said anything about it?" Heather asked him in a voice, he imagined, she thought was all too appealing in its helplessness.

It wasn't, though. It simply rankled. "Nope," James said with a tight smile. "I've heard nothing until this meeting. Excuse me, I want to get home."

He left her, then, not caring if he was rude or not. He really didn't like it when people treated him like an extension of his father. Honestly, he didn't know how Al stood it.

Granted, James was often compared to his mother who was an amazing Chaser in her own right. So, it wasn't like he didn't have some family comparisons going on. Still, he preferred to be in his mother's shadow over his father's any day.

He arrived home to find his mum there with his wife and son. "Did you hear the news?" his mum asked the second he was through the door.

"Yeah," James assured her as he picked up the toddling Alex and bent to kiss his wife. "Coach let us know and that there would be a change to game schedules from here on out. Have you heard from Dad yet?"

"Nothing but a note to say he was going to work late," Ginny sighed. "I came over here for a bit of company while I was waiting and to tell Caroline, but she's already heard from the cheer gym that all classes are cancelled. It's looking serious for the Muggles."

If Mum hadn't heard from Dad, then things had to be very serious at work. Normally, he'd have taken the time to fill her in on something this serious, if he had the option.

James sighed and took Alex with him to the kitchen. "Well, let's start dinner and try not to worry about it too much. We can't fix it."

They waited through dinner but when his dad didn't contact them, his mum went home and they put Alex to sleep and settled down on the couch to read. James briefly stroked his wife's belly, but then settled in with his book.

He wasn't reading long before there was a knock at the door and he heard Louis' voice call out before his cousin opened the door and stuck his head in. "Is this a bad time?"

James stared at his cousin's expression and shook his head. "No, what's up?"

"The news…" Louis said as he came in and flopped down on one of the chairs opposite them. "It's all over Diagon Alley today. The Muggles are shutting everything down as they try to figure out what the virus is that's making everyone sick."

James pulled his wife closer almost by reflex as Caroline made a disheartened sound. He glanced at the smoldering fire and wished his father would come through and tell him what was going on. "Have we heard anything about magical people catching it?"

"No," Louis told him with a frown. "I'd wondered that so I went and asked Victoire, but she said that everything she learned about it today was that it was Muggles only. That happens, you know. We don't catch… uh… I think she said chicken pox and they don't catch dragon pox. It's something like that. Victoire had a better explanation, but it was something like that. She said that St. Mungo's was looking into it right now, but the first thing they did was determine that the magical community was immune."

It was a relief. James hated to admit it was a relief, but there he was… relieved. His family was all going to be safe. But the Muggles… "Are people dying?"

"Yeah," Louis confirmed sadly. "Yeah, that's what prompted the government response. They had a, what do they call it when a bunch of people get sick?"

"A pandemic," Caroline offered as she rubbed absently at her stomach. "It's called a pandemic, and you mean the one back in 2020?"

"Yeah," Louis agreed, pointing to her. "That's the one. Well, they had that and locked down and the country was none too happy about it, but this one is apparently a lot more deadly and it's killing a wider range of people so the government sent out the order to shut down completely until they could get a handle on it."

James shook his head. "What pandemic?"

"It wasn't talked about much in the magical world," Caroline told him. "It was easy for us to skirt around the Muggle precautions without any trouble. I only knew about it because we had a Muggle neighbor who talked endlessly about it when she saw us outside."

"I didn't know anything about it," Louis admitted with a wry smile. "Victoire told me about it today. I didn't even really know the word as it isn't something we deal with."

James let out a loud sigh and wished his mother would give him a clue as to what was happening. Until someone contacted them, they would sit and wait. Or likely go to sleep and read about it in the paper the next day.

Sometimes having family in the Ministry was absolutely useless.

~*~

Harry was absolutely swamped. Half of the team he'd sent to America to help out after the attack were back, full time, in England. He'd taken Teddy on to shadow him and it had worked out better than Harry could have possibly imagined. He'd continued to push his trainees, Al and Lena, and he was attempting to keep his marriage alive when he only saw his wife two or three nights a week.

Now they were dealing with a Muggle plague of sorts and Harry did not feel right about it, in any way. He'd voiced his concerns to the Minister that it was just too neat of a plan, but she'd pointed out that the Muggles had pandemics on a semi-regular basis and he should just let them get on with it, while he focused on how to keep the magical population from running afoul of the Muggle laws. Of course, that wasn't actually Harry's job.

Harry's job was to be a paranoid bastard like Mad-Eye Moody and see a hex in absolutely everything. He owed Moody his life. He owed Moody a lot more than that. He'd been someone that, as a child, Harry had respected but thought just a bit cracked. Now he knew that Moody had the right of it and it was better to think that way than to be sorry later. He'd learned that when body parts started to show up at Hogwarts. He'd learned that lesson when he'd missed the fact that Crabbe had placed a bomb on the train tracks that would see the Hogwarts Express pass over. He'd see it in the blown train, in the mangled bodies of children, in the fear of not knowing if his own children had survived.

He'd learned his lessons.

It made him ask questions. Just then, he was trying to find the origins of the pandemic so he could see if, possibly, it was connected to their problems with Crabbe. It seemed highly unlikely. It wasn't as though she'd know how to engineer a Muggle virus, not in the way she could create a potion or a curse, but it seemed too neat and tidy and that made him want to ask the question.

Could Crabbe be behind this? If it was Crabbe, how had she managed it? Obviously, she had money, but was it the kind of money that could buy off Muggle scientists who would have the capacity to create something like this? In his talks with Hermione and Audrey, they both concluded that the answer was no and that the sort of skill needed to create something like this would have been held only in the governments of some of the more advanced countries. If he asked the Americans about it, he'd be skirting the edge of going against the Minister's edict to drop his inquiry, so he'd asked the next best person he could.

He'd called Nat's father, Curtis Parker, and asked his opinion on the whole thing. Curtis had been silent a long moment and then asked if someone could fetch him from his current location in New Zealand. They'd locked down the country and he couldn't get out, but he wanted to get home. Julienne, Nat's mum, was in France and reporting on the story, Curtis had told him. She wasn't likely to want to leave, but Curtis had sounded… odd.

Harry had asked Teddy to get a Portkey to go get him and his godson had been gone, now, for almost three hours. It shouldn't have taken long to get him back. He'd cleared it with the New Zealand Ministry beforehand and they'd had no problems with them extracting a Muggle to aid them in an investigation.

Alright, so Harry was completely flouting the 'no investigating' edict from the Minister.

He had a feeling and he needed a Muggle who was fully in the Muggle world to help him interpret what he was reading in their papers. As Harry well knew, the papers could lie.

"We're here," Teddy told him as he barely knocked at Harry's door and pushed it open. "Aunt Hermione caught me before I could leave and told me I had to take him for an exam at St. Mungo's before I brought him into the Ministry."

"I'm fit as a fiddle," Curtis assured him as he held out a hand for Harry. Like Harry, Curtis' hair was starting gray around the temples and his blue eyes had a few more lines than the last time he'd seen him, but he was still the same man he'd met so many years before. "I read the writing on the wall about the pandemic weeks ago and started to isolate myself from other people. We were seeing the news about a mysterious illness beginning to kill people but it was sporadic enough that most people didn't pick up on it until it hit like a tidal wave. I remember the pandemic of 2020 all too well."

"I barely did," Harry admitted sheepishly. "It was five years ago and it barely made a blip."

Curtis shook his head and smiled sadly. "It would have been a bigger problem for me if you hadn't been able to fetch us from wherever we were in the world. We didn't have to wait for quarantines or border restrictions."

"Ah," Harry nodded and realized that yes, because he could get them, they didn't have to fuss over the Muggle rules. "Close the door, Teddy. Did Hermione ask you why you were fetching Curtis?"

"She didn't have to," Teddy said as he shut the door. "You know her. Absolutely nothing gets by her unless she wants it to. She told me to tell you to be discreet."

"So, you're worried this isn't a naturally created virus?" Curtis asked him as he dropped into a chair, his worn jeans stretching over his thighs. "Do you have anything to go on?"

"Not a damn thing," Harry admitted with a long sigh as he fell into his own seat and Teddy took the one next to Curtis. "But I have this nagging feeling in my gut that she's behind it."

He didn't need to elaborate on who. They all knew who he meant.

"She's done insane things before," Teddy said slowly. "Her main point has been attacking the women, but she's done other things."

"Let me tell you what I know so far," Curtis told him, folding his hands together and sitting forward. "I've been trying to figure out where patient zero came from, but it's a damn sight harder to do that with the way we travel around. It's safe to say it's not somewhere very poor, as it would have concentrated in those areas before spreading worldwide. We would have had a bottleneck of people infected who could only infect those they saw daily. In a wider world where air travel is common, we could have the first infected person catch a flight in Heathrow, infect the entire flight, and then when it landed in Paris, every single one of those people catches another flight to somewhere else to start the next round of infections."

"Alright," Harry said slowly, trying to remember what it had been like living in the Muggle world. "I remember that a bit, I think. One kid would have a cold and then suddenly most of the class would have it."

"Exactly," Curtis agreed with a nod. "Your patient zero is that kid and rather than keep him home from school, his mother might have dosed him with medicine and sent him anyway, thus felling half the class who then took it home to their homes and infected everyone there. Then one of the dads has to go to work still, so he takes the illness to work and infects several adults there, who take it home to their kids and maybe infect another school."

"Wow," Teddy blurted out, sitting forward. "That's how it works?!"

"That is how it works," Curtis confirmed. "Some viruses or illnesses don't infect other people well, some do. To keep it simple, we'll say that this new virus spreading around is extremely infectious. We haven't seen numbers like this in a long time. On top of that, it's quite deadly, as well. We're losing people of all ages. In the last pandemic, it was generally the elderly or the sick or those with other medical conditions. Now we have babies who were otherwise healthy who are dying, along with people in their twenties and all the way up through the elderly."

"I hear a but about to come out of your mouth," Harry said as he studied his friend.

"But," Curtis said pensively. "I've seen what it looks like and it looks exactly a typical virus. I'm not a virologist, but I can't see any type of magic in it. It's very average."

"So that means it's not been created?" Teddy asked with confusion.

Curtis shook his head. "I didn't say that. It could very well have been made, but I don't think it's magic."

"Why would she want to cause this much chaos?" Harry asked rhetorically as he rubbed at his head, feeling the lines of his scar under his fingertips. "I mean, if she did go through with this. Why?"

"Ah, well," Curtis cleared his throat and shifted. "As to that, there is a very simple answer." When they both waited, staring at him, Curtis let out a grunt. "Money."

There was a long beat of silence. "Come again?" Harry questioned as he straightened in his seat. "She could make money from this?"

"Oh, yes," Curtis assured him grimly. "If she has a cure to the virus in her possession, she can stand to make herself the richest woman on the planet. She sells that to the Muggle world and she'll be set for life."

"Which would give her the resources to keep making that damn potion she's giving to magical women," Teddy said with a disgusted grunt. "Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant."

Indeed.

Now they had to figure out if it really was her.